Christopher Sly’s Arabian Night: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew as World Literature

This essay draws together Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Kitāb ‘alf layla walayla, or The Arabian Nights, texts conventionally segregated by disciplinary protocols that group texts according to ideas of national or continental traditions rather than on the basis of common tropes or topoi. Each of these texts approaches similarly a common story type, in which a commoner wields the authority of a nobleman for a single day. Not only does reading The Taming of the Shrew and The Arabian Nights together afford a clearer and deeper understanding of each text’s individual critique of hierarchical social power structures, it models a valuable critical practice in a cultural moment when East and West continue to be seen in terms of their allegedly irreconcilable traditions and values. Remeasuring various strands of The Taming of the Shrew’s intertextual web brings the play into conversations about Shakespearean Orientalism, while also recognizing Shakespeare as a cultural and social bridge uniting “East” and “West” in the landscape of global culture.